Many of you have been coming to me with book dreams in hand, wanting to know my tips for how to get published.

I’ve posted quite a few resources here, but if you truly want to create a physical book that you can hold in your hands, here’s the one question you need to answer first:

Do you want to traditionally publish or self publish?

I spent years weighing the pros and cons of both, finally choosing self publishing. Does that mean I recommend self publishing to everyone? Hardly.

Here are my crib notes from years of research and my own experience. If you’ve published your own book and want to weigh in, by all means, add your nuggets of knowledge in the comments below.

Here are my top 8 reasons to self publish (and 3 reasons not to).

Please note that these tips are specific to publishing a children’s picture book. If you’re looking to self publish something else (say a paperback book without pictures, for instance) the financial considerations are considerably less, but some of the other points will still apply.

I’ve lost count of how many people have told me they want to make their picture book someday. That’s why I created a whole Writing & Publishing tips section on this site (under The Archive, upper right). Let’s make that someday now.

One of the sticky points I ran into was digitally laying out my book. Once I had the final copy incorporated into the final art, there was definitely a “What now?” moment. Assuming you’re not a graphic artist, it’s intimidating! But it doesn’t have to be. In this post, I’m going to walk you through how to lay out a picture book with InDesign, step by step.

Okay. Now that we’ve covered the very first step, Logistics, it’s time to talk branding.

And these days, you can’t talk branding without talking social media.

As I detailed in Step 1, it’s best to register yourself as a self-publishing company that’s publishing your book. The same reasoning goes for social media.

Make profiles for your publishing name versus your name or your book name.

This way, all the effort you’re putting into building an online presence will be general enough to extend beyond one book, should you get the bug and create more books in the future. (I certainly hope you will!)

It’ll also keep your author presence professional enough to keep some things private, like your address or pictures of your friends’ kids.